Interview with Leslie Long
[go to Interview Transcription]
Welcome to the first season of Voices of Local Leaders, an interview series created by the Science Yourself initiative to promote and recognize the efforts of professionals and community members of the greater New Haven area. These leaders and their local initiatives value factual information, science literacy and critical thinking as the fundamental base for advancements in education, community engagement, and social transformation.
It is our great honor to kick-start the Voices of Local Leaders series with this delightful interview with Leslie Long, conducted in October 2020. We greatly appreciate Leslie for taking her time to talk to us and share her inspiring views on science education. Her great passion for science, education, and child development is so contagious and insightful that we bet this interview will make you revisit your own views on these topics. We hope you all enjoy learning more about Leslie’s experience and motivation as we did!
Interview Transcription
“My name is Leslie Gill Long and I’m currently working as a Science Facilitator for the Seedlings Foundation, which is a nonprofit that promotes good education of all sorts. I wanted to be a teacher from the time I was pretty little, and that impulse never left me. So, I, number one, love teaching kids and that’s my first priority. I also happen to love all things science. So, the two of those just very naturally married to me becoming a science teacher. I taught children for over 30 years, most recently at the Foote School, I’ve just retired from there last year, I taught primarily 8th grade science, I taught all the 8 graders physical science, I was Department Chair and was Coordinator of the Lower School science program. So that involves kids from kindergarten up to 9th grade”
[Science Yourself] What has inspired you and made you become interested in science in general, and more specific in science education?
[Leslie Long] You know what it was? It really was an excellent teacher. I did not go into college thinking… I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t want to be a science teacher. I loved science, I was very curious about the world, but it didn’t occur to me that would be a path I would follow; until I took a course from a really inspiring professor. And it wasn’t that he was particularly gregarious or dynamic in his personality. He was a chemistry professor who was a little bit dry, but he presented the material in such a way that it was completely compelling and fascinating, and he connected the topic of chemistry to biology and geology. He somehow managed to make all of science clear and interesting. So really it was a teacher who inspired me, and it wasn’t until I was a sophomore in college that that happened. And then I took every single science course that I could fit in, in all sorts of disciplines. They didn't count for my major but I loved it so much that I just continued beyond my undergraduate and taking all courses that I could get, because it’s so intrinsically interesting to me.
[Science Yourself] You’re also involved in providing professional development training for public-school teachers. What got you interested in helping other educators?
[Leslie Long] A big part of my responsibility I felt in teaching kids was to help develop a scientific literate citizenry. And a way to do that, in sort of larger scope, is to educate teachers, so that they can educate kids, and that has sort of a multiplier effect, to really understand science, to not be afraid of science, and to be able to promote it with their children, with their students, and with their students’ parents.
“I’ll tell you one thing that science isn’t. It is not a collection of facts. Science is really the process of using evidence to answer questions about the natural world”
[Science Yourself] When you are teaching, how do you present what science is to your students and other educators?
[Leslie Long] I’ll tell you one thing that science isn’t. It is not a collection of facts. I think that science is as much a process as anything else. I think it’s really the process of using evidence to answer questions about the natural world, about the material world, about phenomenon that we observe. It makes me a little crazy when I see these lists in Middle school classrooms, and even sometimes in Elementary classrooms, about what science is and the scientific method. I think we can reduce it. Sometimes it is lots and lots of rigid steps. That’s not what you see in most good science classrooms. So, really, it’s boiled down to asking questions and answering them using evidence. And we can expand that. We can say [it’s also] communicating your results, analyzing the data, all of that comes in. But at the heart it is questions and evidence and answering those questions.
Leslie demonstrating a science lesson in the chemistry lab with her studentsThe body of information and facts grows and grows and grows, and none of us has just access to that in our minds. We can’t be expected to do it, that’s not a good use of our minds to memorize lots and lots of facts. Facts come in handy. For example, with my 8th graders, they used to come in thinking they had to memorize the periodic chart. I’m like ‘no, no, no, no, no, you have that periodic chart’. On the other hand, if you use it enough and do enough chemistry, which was basically what they were doing, some of those facts become part of your memory bank. But there is no point in memorizing things that you can look up. Unless it’s something that you need to have ready access to.
And it can be fascinating. I had one child that wanted to learn [the periodic chart] in both English and in Chinese, a language that he was studying. That’s great, that’s good, that’s fine. But more important is to see it as a tool, and it’s useful in that way.
[Science Yourself] What are the benefits that you see on having a more cross disciplinary approach, where science topics are embedded in other disciplines?
[Leslie Long] One place where that was nicely articulated was when STEM education first came about, and it was the National Science Foundation who coined that phrase. And what they really wanted was for it to be cross disciplinary and not just science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but rather across all of the disciplines. Because we know [due to] our work on child development, [not only] my personal work but also the work that I’ve read about and that I understand, is that it’s just more meaningful to people to learn within a larger context. Information that stands alone can be very interesting, but when you can apply it more broadly, there’s no question that is just more meaningful. There is not a discipline that I can think of really to which science can’t be connected. Take for example Biology and Chemistry. Biological processes are chemical processes, right? I’m married to a physicist and he would argue that all of that is governed by the laws of Physics. So, yeah, this doesn’t stand by itself.
My perspective is that, once one embraces that, it can actually make life easier. And it actually frees teachers and gives them time because, while they are teaching literature, they could be reinforcing science concepts, and the other way around. For example, one of the big things that we see in science is pattern. We see patterns in data, we see patterns in all sorts of things. Pattern is also a big thing in art. Art and science just seem like easily integrated and combined topics. There’s a lot of art in science, and there’s a lot of science in art. Life is not divided like that, and school shouldn’t be either. It’s artificial to me.
“There’s a lot of art in science, and there’s a lot of science in art. Life is not divided like that, and school shouldn’t be either”
[Science Yourself] How do you see the scientific approach & critical thinking in your everyday life?
[Leslie Long] I cannot imagine not approaching so much of what I do from a scientific perspective. When I buy things and think about the safety of those things, I want to know that they’ve been tested. When I think about my health, or what I’m going to do to maintain my health. Get vaccinations. I look at evidence and I trust the scientific process. I know that there is a group of scientists that have gone through peer-review before decisions were made, before recommendations were made. It really has to do with health, it has to do with safety, it has to do with the viability of our world. Because we are making decisions about what cars to buy, we are making decisions about what forms of energy we are willing to accept, and we simply have to look at the data. We don’t look at it at our own peril. So [the scientific perspective] is an intrinsic part of my life and I cannot imagine it not being.
What better do we have to go by? What better is there than the scientific process? I think people don’t understand that this process is peer-reviewed, giving us the best that is available. That’s not to say that things can’t change, that recommendations can’t change if the evidence changes. It doesn’t invalidate what’s been done, it only represents further progress on what’s been done. But I think folks don’t realize that. And when they hear that something that has been scientifically validated becomes invalidated, it makes them skeptical about the whole process. But that’s the way it works: constantly furthering our knowledge. And scientists [may] modify recommendations based on that [more comprehensive] knowledge. It’s dynamic and it’s just critical to an informed citizenry. Science may not be perfect in terms of making recommendations to us, but there is nothing better. And I trust it!
[Science Yourself] What is a common myth or misconception about science that you had come across in the classroom with your students? And how do you work around this challenge?
[Leslie Long] I think most kids come to us with innate curiosity. I shouldn’t say most kids, I’ve never met a kid that didn’t. But, by the time they are a little older, they have a very rigid idea what a scientist is. If you were to ask them to draw a scientist, they would probably draw a male, in a white coat, maybe with a wild hair, and a big head. By the time they are in Middle school, they often see science as something sort of “otherly”, not them, not something that they can be. That notion can be disavowed by showing that scientists come in all stripes and that they can be scientists. The best science education simulates the process of science. They’re asking questions, they don’t know the answer to those questions, they’re taking data, the data is what answers the question, they understand that data has to be reproducible. And you know what? The data tells the story. It just works out. I don’t have to fudge anything; the data tells the story. Sometimes they’ll draw conclusions. I ask them to engage in productive argument about those conclusions, and to communicate that to their peers. That’s science! That’s going through the process of science as close as possible to the work of laboratory researchers.
“I think it’s very comforting to know that you don’t have to have all the answers. And that you can just explore with the kids”
[Science Yourself] What misconceptions about science have educators brought to you during the professional development sessions?
[Leslie Long] Most of the teachers that I work with are Pre-school through 8th grade. And those who aren’t science specialist, and most of them aren’t, they probably had a science methods course, they probably had some science classes, but I think it wouldn’t be unfair to say that a lot of them are a little bit fearful about science. I think that, even though some of them are young and should’ve gone through an inquiry-based program, they think that science is this list of facts. And that they can’t possibly learn this list of facts. And you know what? I don’t have that list of facts for all of science. That’s a lot of stuff.
So that’s what we have to change: for them to understand that if a child asks a question, they’re not unsuccessful if they don’t know the answer for that question. What makes you successful is if you’re willing to say: “Well, let’s find out.” And sometimes that means shifting the question a little bit. [For example], if a preschooler asks you something about why the sky is blue. You’re not going to go into all of the spectrum... The explanation for that is a deep explanation. But what you can do is turn that question around and say “Well, is the sky always blue? What does the sky look like in the morning versus in the evening?” A teacher’s job, I think in part, is to shift non-investigable questions to investigable or testable questions. And that, very often, is to take away the big how and why to what if we did this. You can relate that to almost any question that a child has. And that is not to dismiss their question. You can give them an answer that they can understand, [although] it’s a challenge to answer tough questions in a way that a little child can understand. But to have them investigate it is really, I think, what we are shooting for here.
Leslie on a field trip to the Long Island SoundIt’s a whole paradigm shift, I think. The [teachers] that we help train at Seedlings, they’re surprisingly open to, specially once they had practiced at it. I think it’s very comforting to know that you don’t have to have all the answers. And that you can just explore with the kids. That’s actually really the ideal. So, once you get beyond primary school, it's nice to have enough background knowledge to be able to direct the question in a way that is really meaningful. But I think we are teaching teachers to have some confidence. Because you know what? They can do it. Every teacher can do that! It’s joyful, it’s so much fun to do it. It’s exploration. Kids love it, and adults love it.
You know what is also nice? You see a lot of citizen science where people are actually taking data, they may be recording populations in their area, that actually becomes part of a larger database. I think that is really cool. We’re all scientists at some level, if we are at all curious!
[Science Yourself] What would be your advice to someone who is fascinated by science and education, and is seriously thinking about becoming a science educator?
[Leslie Long] Having just said that you don’t have to have all the answers. One thing that I would say for somebody who really wants to become a science educator is to get as much coursework under your belt as you can. Because that also helps with confidence. Now, I’m talking about people who are going to be science teachers, not elementary teachers that are required to teach a broad range of subjects. The more science knowledge I have, the more confident I am. And the more intrigued I am every time I encounter something as fascinating as a [particular] topic, that prompts more questions, prompts a desire to learn more. For some people that love science, study some science yourself. There’s lots of great literature out there about how kids best learn science. There’s a lot of work that has been done by cognitive scientists and others that study the way children learn. There’s great literature out there that is really inspiring. And makes one, first of all, better understand how kids learn, and does a nice job help us understand how science is best taught.
